If this Tweet isn’t “Mansplaining Gone Wild,” I don’t know what is. 
Rah! Rah! Roundup
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
Bloodlines: No Wave Performance Task Force’s PERIOD PIECE Traces the Lineage of Menstrual Art
In the past year or so, something has shifted in our culture in how we’re talking about periods. We recently saw women responding to Donald Trump’s misogynistic comments about news anchor Megan Kelly by live-tweeting their periods at him, and artist Sarah Levy created a portrait of Trump in menstrual blood, and both of these items got a good amount of mainstream media coverage. Over the summer, the story of Kiran Gandhi, a woman who ran the London Marathon while bleeding freely, was being shared widely online, and earlier this year there was some uproar about artist Rupi Kaur’s images of herself with period stains being removed from Instagram. The Atlantic did that piece about why women hide their tampons, and we’ve seen menstrual product marketers playing into women’s interest in more “real” period talk for a while now. And of course there’s the fact that every time I’m in the subway, I see ads for “underwear for women with periods,” which, as far as subway ads go, makes my commute feel kinda like a surreal feminist utopia.
Not to say that we don’t still have a long way to go to undo our culture’s widespread period shame mentality, but lately it feels like menstruation is getting talked about more openly and honestly than ever before. Maybe we’re lashing out at an administration that’s waging a war on women’s reproductive rights. Or maybe this new cultural shift toward period positivity is just another example of how feminism has been recently more accepted (co-opted, even?) by the mainstream media. Whatever the reason, I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say that periods have been having somewhat of a renaissance on the internet—and it’s about time.
Filed under Art + Comics, Books + Literature, We Were There
We All Always Feel As Though We Are 12 Years Old Inside :: An Interview with Heather O’Neill
Imagine a place where stories continue after the teller stops talking, the characters continue to move and exist and even question that very existence after the narrator has left the scene. Imagine an island where women are so scarce, men instead date human/animal hybrids, learning the troubles and joys of falling in love with a half-swan. Imagination, stretched to its very fantastic ends, is key in Heather O’Neill’s new collection of short stories, Daydreams of Angels, a collection that explores these premises and more. I got the chance to talk to the woman the literary world has nicknamed the “demented angel with an uncanny knack for metaphor” about the inspiration behind these stories, her own relationship to fantasies and more:
Continue reading
Filed under Books + Literature, Interviews
Rah! Rah! Roundup
“We can beautifully fracture our surfaces when we are challenged to confront what appear to be the limits of our selves. This is what working in collaboration means to me.”–Poet Dawn Lundy Martin
Charli XCX says her documentary, “The F Word and Me” is exploring how “the question ‘whats it like to be a woman in the music industry’ is annoying/complex but still necessary.” Continue reading
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
Best of 2015: Top 10 Albums Featuring Strong Female &/or Genderqueer Vocals
There are and will be many Best Music of 2015 lists floating around on the ‘nets, but none featuring strong female and/or genderqueer vocals—until now! In arbitrary/alphabetical order:
1. Anna Van Hausswolff – The Miraculous
This album felt more doom-metal than her last, which I was surprised by/totally okay with.
Filed under Music + Playlists
Outfit of the Day Beyond 30 – Call for Submissions: Your Holiday Power Outfit
“Vain trifles as the seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world’s view of us” — Virginia Woolf, Orlando
Hello Weird Sister readers! We don’t know each other, so let me introduce myself. I’m a woman named Michael with short hair, a smart mouth (thanks for the FYI, gran), and an undying love of personal style, runway fashion, and jackets with threatening collars.
I’m also, quite proudly, 36. And I’m here to launch Weird Sister‘s new personal style column for women over 30. Continue reading
Filed under Clothes + Fashion
Rah! Rah! Roundup
Claire Vaye Watkins wrote a powerful meditation on pandering, privilege, and the patriarchy for Tin House: “If you like my book I’m grateful. But I remind you that people at the periphery will travel to accept and even love things not made for or toward them: we have been trained to do so our entire lives. I’m not trying to talk anyone out of their readerly response, only to confess to what went on in my mind when I made the book, to assemble an honest inventory of people I have not been writing toward (though I thought I was): women, young women, people of color, the rural poor, the American West, my dead mother.”
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
#TriggerWarning: Fear and Loathing On Campus
Trigger warning: this piece deals with sexual violence.
Trigger warnings are relatively new to the popular discourse. Some people don’t understand them, but as a former peer counselor, now part of a psychiatric team, I’ve seen strong evidence that they support emotional health and intellectual development. This is mostly a personal essay, but I’ll launch into some obligatory context for a moment.
The broader debates about the balance of power in higher education, from sexual assault to racist Halloween costumes, from online activism to recent campus protests, have been repeatedly misunderstood by cultural critics and the media. Since avoiding triggers is a symptom of trauma, many journalists (including this Atlantic cover story), argue that trigger warnings aren’t a healthy way of dealing with PTSD; even President Obama has concluded that they “coddle” students. Yet in making these arguments, all these folks miss a fundamental point about the balance of power (and another one about the nature of trauma, but I’ll get to that later). If statistics told you that one in four students were likely to have been traumatically attacked by spiders and that some developed serious arachnophobia, we would hope that classes dealing with spider attacks would do so with tact and compassion. A trigger warning is a tactful, compassionate nod to student experience. It allows students who have been denied agency by an oppressive experience to choose if they are interested in engaging with it, and to engage with it knowing what it entails, and taking the necessary steps to care for themselves as they do. Yes, the ongoing effects of trauma may involve avoidance of something deeply feared; that’s due to a difference in the individual’s ability to extinguish their fear response. The best place to confront deep fear is in therapy, not in a classroom. To subject such students to assignments or public discussions about the subject of their trauma without warning is to re-enact oppression, denying them time to assemble their courage. I know a little about this from my own experience. Continue reading
Filed under Everything Else
Rah! Rah! Roundup
Filed under Rah! Rah! Roundup
Girl Meets Girl Meets World
I was interviewed as a Boy Meets World superfan in a January 2013 issue of the Canadian magazine Macleans. For the last three years this has been my fun fact whenever I have to introduce myself at a company icebreaker. Apparently there is no bigger fan of Boy Meets World on the Internet.
Boy Meets World, in case you were not a TV-binging latchkey kid in the 1990s, is a sitcom about a boy named Cory who is supposed to be fairly average in every way: average student, average nuclear family with 2.5 kids (literally, he has a brother all the time and a sister only some of the time, due to standard 90s sitcom continuity problems). Notable characters in Cory’s life include Mr. Feeny, the impossibly wise history teacher, who is also his next-door neighbor; best friend Shawn, who is from the Wrong Side of the Tracks and has Tremendously Important Father Issues; and Cory’s on-again, off-again girlfriend Topanga, who started out as a comical weirdo but morphed into a standard Pretty Girl Love Interest, for which I hated her.
It’s not a particularly notable show. Starlee Kine described its comforting blandness on the This American Life episode “Reruns”: “It didn’t even matter that I didn’t watch it as a little kid. I can imagine little kids being in really comfortable, carpeted family rooms and laying with their elbows propped up and watching Boy Meets World and feeling really safe. Because it’s like the safest thing in the world.”
Boy Meets World season one cast. Cory kneels in front, wearing primary colors red and blue to denote him as the hero, and holds the hand of his sometimes-nonexistent little sister, Morgan. Cool big brother Eric leans in from the left, while parents Amy and Alan hug and judge behind. Blazer-wearing history teacher/crotchety neighbor/stalker Mr. Feeny frowns imperiously, while Rebel Friend Shawn smirks and wears a tie-dye T-shirt with sharks on it like a boss. Not pictured: the love of Cory’s life, Topanga. She wasn’t that important in season one.
Filed under Movies + TV
